In and Out of Three Normandy Inns

oon we were out

ock-heaps, or sea-weeds massed, was covered by thousands and thousands of black, lozenge-shaped bivalves. These bivalves were the mussels. Over this bed of shells and slime there moved and toiled a whole villageful of old women. Where the sea met the edges of the mud-flat the throng of women was thickest. The line of the ever-receding shore was marked by the shapes of countless bent figures. The heads of these stooping women were on a level with their feet, not one stood upright. All that the eye could s

, against the blind forces of nature. For this combat the women were armed to the teeth, clad as they were in their skeleton muscular leanness; helmeted with their heads of iron; visored i

he toil of men. But the high-pitched laughter proved them women, as did their loud and unceasing gossip. The battle of the voices rose above the swa

A SALE OF MUSSE

ss scraping, lunging, digging, made a new world of sound-strange, sinister, uncanny. It was neither of the sea nor yet of the land-it was a noise that see

a mussel with dexterity. These women, as they dipped their knives into the thick mud, swept the diminutive black bivalve with a trenchant movement, as a Moor might cl

sweet of wetted weeds, the aromatic flavor that shell-life yields, and the smells also of rotten and decaying fish-all these were inext

smile would gape between the nose and the meeting chin. A high good humor appeared to reign among the groups; a carnival of merriment laughed itself out in coarse,

face now, since we were far out along the outer edges of the bed; we were so near the

tch in a group directly in front. "This life makes old women of them in no

f wet mussels. She was carrying it to a distant pool. Once beside the pool, with swift, dexterous movement the heavy basket was slipped from the bent back, the load of mussels falling in a shower into the miniature lake. The next instant she was stamping on the heap, to plunge them with her sabot still further into the pool. She was washing her load. Soon she s

gainst the sky-the bust of a young warrior rather than a woman. There was a hardy, masculine freedom in the pliable motion of her straight back, a ripple with muscles that played easily beneath the close bodice, in her arms, and her finely turned ankles and legs, that were bared below the knee. The very s

disturbs, haunting the mind with vague, unsatisfied suggestions of something

a long moment of scrutiny, his eyes following the lean, stately figure

stiffened image of clay, after this life of freedom, th

when they see a good thing at once count on its possessorship, as if the whole world, indeed, were et

ancs a day with her six basketfuls. I'll of

"the mussel-bed a reddish violet, the sky red in the horizon, and the girl in the foreground, with that torrent o

ketched at a wrinkled, bent figure, who was smi

vous, M'si

the mortgage,

t'll be paid

? One of yo

nce for you. She's sixty-five, if she's a minute; she's been working here, on this mussel-bed, for five years, to

ine-at

very

dsome man at the creame

No, the gentleman of Augustine's-well, perhaps not of her affections, but of her mother's choice, is a peasant who

rro

me-over there?" Renard blushed a little. "I mean I wish to f

enly started, with full basket loads, toward a fishing boat that had dropped anchor close in to the shore; it was a Honfleur craft, come to buy mussels for the Paris m

was the tide. It was pushing the women upward, as if it had been a

d. The long, yellow, lichen leaves massed on the rocks were dyed as if lying in a yellow bath. The sands were richly colored; the ridges were brown in the shadows and burnished at the tops. In the distance the sea weeds

the tide i

eking with dirt. Volumes of slush are splashed on the bared skinny ankles, on the wet skirts, wet to the waists, and on the coarse sail-cloth aprons tied beneath the hanging bosoms. The women are all drenched now in a bath of filth. The basket

a level with their hands, they seem but gnomes; surely they are huge, undeveloped embryos of women, with neither head nor trunk. For this light is pitiless. It makes them even more a part of this earth, out of which they seem to have sprung, a strange amorphous growth. The bronzed

e is al

wet skirts startlingly distinct in tones; beyond, sails a fantastic fleet, with polychrome sails, each spar, masthead, and wrinkled sail as sharply outlined as if chiselled in relief. Presently these miniature pictures fade as the light fades. Blacker grows the mud, and there is less and less of it; the sil

ide i

osier hedges. We hear it break with a sudden dash and splu

f toiling fish wives, all was gone; it was all as if it had not been-would never be again. The water hissed along the beach; it broke in rhythmic, sonorous measure against the parapet. Surely there

ry epitome of